Progress Chef

Progress Chef provides the Chef 360 platform, bringing infrastructure configuration, compliance and orchestration together, offered as SaaS or self managed with published Business and Enterprise tiers. The vendor states Fortune 500 companies are among its customers.

Combining configuration with compliance is the structural argument and it is a sound one. A configuration management system already knows the exact state of every machine, which is precisely the information a compliance audit asks for. Keeping them separate means a compliance tool re scans machines to discover facts the configuration system already holds, and the two then disagree.

Compliance as code is the practical expression: a control is written as testable code rather than as a paragraph in a policy document, so it can be checked continuously and automatically instead of sampled quarterly by a person. That changes compliance from a periodic exercise into a property of the system.

Publishing tier pricing is unusual for infrastructure software at this level and helps a buyer size the commitment. Offering both SaaS and self managed matters for the regulated customers this product attracts, some of whom cannot send an inventory of their infrastructure to a vendor's cloud under any circumstances.